Beyond the communicable, there remains in all language and its constructions something incommunicable. … And what seeks to be represented and even produced in the development of languages is that kernel of pure language itself.

–Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”

Time and again, I wrote him letters. Many of my later letters made their way into magazines and memoirs, but the best I’ve written, the one I wrote him, I’ve never talked about. Even today I struggle to write this tale, for the fear in my heart still burns, but now that he is gone and I myself only steps away from death, I have few excuses not to. So bear with me as I grope for the right words.

I was a perceptive, lonely kid raised by a struggling, drinking single father. We lived in Oakland where the liquor store down the block opened from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. He loved me dearly. In the life after childhood, I have encountered and loved many other alcoholics—horny drunks, mean drunks, and lying drunks—but never again have I met someone like my father. He made comforting dinners of vegetable soup with fresh buns and read me stories from his worn copies of wuxia on his sober days. On drinking days, he became a demon. Every word I dared to utter was wrong and every inch of space my body occupied unforgivable. Look at you. So timid and useless, he said. You know that in this country we might be separated if anyone finds out about this. He shook the bottle in his hand and laughed. I was perpetually scared. Scared that he would get into trouble in the store, set the apartment on fire with his cigarette butt, or crash the car into the oncoming traffic. Scared that he would never come home. But he always did—sometimes after I had fallen asleep in tears, but when I woke up, he would always be there. I loved mornings. I still do. Sober, he sat on my bed and held my hand. He was gentle, apologetic, childlike. Get dressed, silly, he said. I made us breakfast.

I learned early on that it was no use trying to talk sense to the drunk father, yet I dared not break the glorious morning light by instigating a fight. I wanted his eyes to linger on my face, to be fed breakfast and read stories, to pretend that empty bottles did not crowd our recycling bin. When the night fell again, regret would fill my chest. That was when I started to write him letters. I wrote them when he left for the liquor store, when his lighter flicked again in the kitchen, when he yelled my name from his bedroom and demanded water, towel, more beer. In the morning, after breakfast together, I left the letters on the kitchen counter on my way out to school.

I wrote in English first, and when it didn’t seem like I was coming across, I translated myself into Chinese. It was usually a page or two filled with I wish and I hope and please and we are so happy when you are not drinking and it is not going to bring mom back and you seem to really suffer and why couldn’t you just stop. He hid the letters in his nightstand and refused to acknowledge them. The first time I wrote the whole thing in Chinese without translating myself, he sat me down after school and asked me to please stop. I will stop drinking. I promise—this time I mean it. I couldn’t decide if I believed him. Words were not to be trusted. That stretch of sobriety, the longest he had ever managed, lasted two weeks.

The day I finally got it was my fifteenth birthday. My best friend had taught me to pray that year. Sara—her mother didn’t drink but her brother hit them. During recess, Sara prayed that her brother wouldn’t be in his bitter mood. My Lord and my Father, she taught me to mumble as she prayed to her father in prison and I to my sober father in the morning, we love you and praise you. Please hear our prayers and bless us. On my walk home that day, I prayed. Please, help me write a letter that can move my father and make him quit for good.

He was not home when I returned to a dark apartment. I sat down on the floor and opened my notebook on our low coffee table. Then I bargained with the Lord to let me capture it, to pull the strings of my heart out and line them up with words, to let my reasons unfold themselves on my page. If nothing else, please give me this as my birthday present, I prayed.

I picked up the fountain pen my mother left behind along with her china and old magazines and started writing. That was when it flew out of me. It was neither English nor Chinese, neither words nor illustration. It was my heart, smelted into a warm and thick liquid, glistening with sorrow and truthfulness, weighty and corporeal yet free and floating, surrounding my body like a mother’s embrace. Then it wiped away my tears and ensconced itself on my notebook, its body full of grace.

That night, I fell asleep hopeful. The letter sat in my backpack, the cure for his early death and my impending fatherless adulthood. I woke up in the middle of the night to a flash of bright light in my bedroom. By the moonlit window stood a naked woman with her back to me. She held my letter in her right hand and tapped it on my desk. One, two, three times. By then I knew by heart the images of Dionysus, Silenus, Varuni, and Du Kang—Sara said I should pray to all the gods of liquor, ask them to release their hold on my father. I tried to pray as I was told, but soon learned that I was no obedient supplicant. The gods and goddesses of liquor became the regular cast in my violent dreams. Dionysus had a tiny dangling penis and grapes draped under his fingers; Silenus was an angry old man with thick muscles and a perpetual boner; Varuni brandished her round breasts with a masculine face; Du Kang had dark eyebrows so bushy that they flew off his face. And I was the hunter who could travel through continents and dynasties. I galloped on my black horse to rid the world of liquor, not stopping until all the bodies of the gods and goddesses of liquor collapsed under my sword.

The woman in my bedroom, however, was not a goddess I had slain in my dreams. She was a wrathful deity I hadn’t known of before, and I had no sword. I knew I should pray for forgiveness. I never meant to offend, I should say, please leave the letter. Yet when I opened my mouth, my words broke apart in shame, dissolving into air on my tongue. Soon the room darkened, and the deity of pure language and my letter were gone with the light.

The next morning, he kissed my forehead and said, Happy birthday, my love. He would never receive that letter or stop drinking. He died young. Long before my writings found their way into the hands of others. In the decades since his passing, some would say that my writing reached a lot of people. I know, however, that after that night I was only blundering.